It’s so cold the weather made me reminisce
about some of my ex-girlfriends.

It’s so cold, Miley Cyrus put her
clothes on.

Or this one that I just came up
with: It’s so cold politicians are starting to look warm and friendly.

Now you know why I don’t do
stand-up.

They’re probably all variations on
jokes someone already came up with. Besides, this being Indiana, it could be in
the 50’s when you read this. But as I wrote it the temperature was minus 15, so
I think I’m justified in saying it’s so cold they canceled Cleveland. The whole
city. They just canceled it. And
nobody else noticed.

I did some research for this column
(shut up, I did), and came across
such things as it’s so cold I saw a politician with his hands in his own
pockets, and it’s so cold I saw a gangsta pull his pants up. But my heart
really wasn’t in it, because it was so cold the truth becomes ridiculous
without the need for exaggeration. For instance:

It’s so cold that boiling water thrown
in the air turns instantly to snow.

Next question: What fool would go
out with boiling water in that weather? I hope it was some weatherman getting
paid to go out, show it’s too cold to go out, and tell people not to go out.

On a related note, it’s so cold The
Weather Channel named this storm “Winter Storm &#$%*@!”

It’s so cold salt and other
chemicals put on roadways to melt ice stopped melting anything. But that’s
okay, because nobody could get past the snow drifts, anyway.

It’s so cold the Chicago Zoo had to
keep their penguins and polar bears indoors.

Even inside, the penguins asked for
extra blankets. The polar bears demanded their fish be fried.

It’s so cold that it got into the
single digits – in Atlanta, Georgia. Atlanta residents haven’t shivered so much
since they heard Sherman was marching their way.

It’s so cold antifreeze could
freeze.

Well, not right here, but in Minnesota
it got down to minus 36. Prestone antifreeze freezes as minus 34. So far as I
know, there is no antifreeze antifreeze.

However, we Hoosiers aren’t out of
the frigid woods: vodka freezes at minus 16.51 degrees. It’s so cold, the cold
can’t even drive you to drink.

In Canada, it’s so cold that it’s
actually warmer on Mars.

But it’s okay – Canadians are used
to it.

Also in Canada, the severe cold has
caused some “frost quakes”. That happens when the temperature drops so much, so
fast, that ice causes the earth to crack open. The same thing happened in 2011
in Ohio and Indiana. This helps me with the screenplay I’m writing for the SyFy
channel, which I’ve titled: “SnowTornadoIceQuake Shark Attack”. I know what
you’re thinking: Sharks? Hey, I’m out for the ratings, so I’m having some
teenage snowboarders in bikinis jump the shark.

Ratings Gold.

It’s so cold that in Green Bay
people are grilling beer.

Apparently this happened at a
football game tailgating party, where it was so cold the beer froze and had to
be set on the grill to thaw out. In related news, a nearby fan received a
concussion after he asked someone to throw him a brat.

And now you know why I don’t go to
football game tailgating parties.

It’s so cold that I filled my
column up with twenty-three repetitions of “it’s so cold”, because my chilled
mind couldn’t come up with anything else.

Okay, how about this: It’s so cold
that when I came in from shoveling snow I climbed into the refrigerator to get
warm.

Oh, here’s one: It’s so cold people
were getting frostbite while thinking
about going outside.

Let’s interrupt this despairing
parade of horrible weather to bring some good news:

My Dad has been declared cancer
free! Yay!!!!

They’re going to continue to check
him every couple of months, which is normal, but for right now it’s nice to
catch a break. I don’t know what the recurrence
rate is for this particular cancer, and I’ve decided I don’t want to know; for
now it’s great that he’s beaten it.

Well, it didn’t work this time. My
system didn’t work, and as a result, the Blizzard of ’14 was all my fault.

I know what you’re thinking: “Mark,
can you be so egotistical as to brag that you affected the weather?”

People, it’s not bragging when it’s
a bad thing. It would be like somebody bragging that they take drugs and commit
crimes. Maybe that was a bad example, considering it’s not unheard of for
people in Hollywood to commit Charlie Sheenisms.

If I claim to have brought on spring
singlehandedly with my mind, then you can stage an intervention. Meanwhile, the
fact remains that the Blizzard of ’14 was directly caused by Hunter’s Law of
Inverse Lousy Predictions Squared.

As far as I know it wasn’t
technically a blizzard where I live, by the way, although it was declared that
one county to the west. “Blizzard” just sounds cooler than “snowstorm”, in the
same way “tornado” sounds cooler than “straight line winds”. There’s something
oddly human about insisting you have the worst weather, which I guess is kind of bragging about bad things.

“You may have a few drifts, but our
blizzard buried semis! By the way, my gallstone was way bigger than your
gallstone and my boss is way meaner than yours. And our snow is colder.”

Anyway, for the last ten years or so
I’ve been predicting a bad winter. Not for this year – for all those years,
every year. “It’s gonna be a bad one this year,” I’d say. “I feel it in my
gut.”

And every year, that feeling in my
gut turned out to be from gorging myself every December on Lions Club citrus.

We kept having mild winters,
instead. (“Mild” sometimes meant ice instead of snow. It’s all relative.) This
is because of Hunter’s Law of Predictions, which states, “Mark Hunter isn’t
very good at making predictions.” It’s a simple rule.

And I was happy with that, because,
as all 14 of my regular readers know, I hate winter. I hate winter so much that
I’m only going to live around here in the summertime after I’m rich, which
should happen any second now. So every year I said “This is the year they’re
going to name “The Godzilla of Winters”, and every year I was wrong. (The
Godzilla of Winters breathes sub-zero snow, instead of fire. Also, he slides
over Tokyo with giant ice skates.)

But I forgot the flipside, Hunter’s
Law of Inverse Lousy Predictions, which reads:

“Whenever Mark Hunter is right about a prediction, it’s something
bad.”

For instance, I correctly predicted the most
recent economic recession. I correctly predicted that China was going to start
flexing its military muscles and mess with its neighbors. I correctly predicted
that my lawnmower would either not start in the spring or break in early summer
… every year since 1988.

To make matters worse, there’s also
Hunter’s Law of Inverse Lousy Predictions Squared.
HLILPS, which is pronounced “Hlilips”, clearly states: “If Mark Hunter makes a
prediction because he wants to be
wrong, sooner or later he will be right”.

It gets complicated. The weather example
is that I predict weather from the tenth level of Hell (which is where they
keep the deep freezes, ice cream supplies, and politicians with frozen hearts).
The original law – Lousy Predictions – kicks in, and so we have (relatively)
nice weather.

But then, sooner or later, someone or
something figures out I’m messing with them. Karma, Murphy, Mother Nature, Al
Gore, whatever. Then the Law’s inversely square part kicks in, and I’m left
holding the bag. By which I mean, I’m left holding the snow shovel.

It’sa given, at that point, that I’ll be suffering from my chronic back
pain, sinus infection, and tendonitis just when the driveway is yelling “shovel
me!” I’ll remember that my boots aren’t insulated, my gloves are too thin, and
that even at 5 degrees I can sweat under my long underwear, a situation that
ironically can lead to hypothermia.

I’ll also be reminded that there are a
lot of great people out there, personified by whoever used a snow blower on my
sidewalk after our first storm, and whoever else has been running a snow plow
through my driveway after every snowfall so far this season.

Much as I still hate winter, that kind
of thing makes me feel a lot better.

Whiskey Creek Press has set the release of The Notorious Ian
Grant for October, 2014. Holy cow, that’s just nine months! I finished filling
out the Title Information Form and Art Information Form yesterday, so the next
step is well underway.

I'm writing some short stories in the lead-up to the book’s release, showing how the
title character came to the odd position he’s in at the opening of the story.
Those will be posted for free, and I’m toying with the idea of having Ian
encounter some characters from TV shows along the way—a shout-out to my past as
a fanfiction writer. Hopefully they’ll be as fun as the book itself.

We were given a huge chest freezer yesterday (Thank you Charis﻿ and Vince for helping us move it!) Fearing someone might slip on the ice while we were moving it inside, I shoveled and scraped and cleaned the sidewalk and driveway pad until there wasn't a speck of ice or now left.

Now it's snowing. I can't help feeling responsible, somehow.

Well, between the shoveling and freezer hauling I hurt my back, to the new snow can just stay there and get comfortable.

Years ago I
shopped at a place called Excel Home Furnishings on the north side of the Noble County Courthouse square. I liked
wandering around the second floor, because they’d installed enclosed bridges
that allowed the furniture to be displayed not only in the original building,
but in two other neighboring ones.

(I have no
explanation for why I love exploring sprawling areas like that. It’s why I keep
getting lost at the State Park … and the mall.)

In one of
those buildings most of the upstairs was open, and there was a big raised area,
like a stage. For someone who lived in a utility apartment at the time, I
thought it was really cool.

It turned
out to be even more cool when one of the employees showed me a normally closed
off area, where we could see the outer walls and roof. There they were, plain
as day: Charred wood and smoke stains. At one time in the distant past, he explained,
the building had burned.

That was my
introduction to the Albion Opera House.

Now the
building is for sale, and there’s a push on to save it. Save it from what, you
say? Well, my first guess would be parking lots. There’s not enough parking in
downtown Albion, but if all the old brick buildings were knocked down and
turned into pavement, there wouldn’t be much reason to park there anyway.

I think it
should be saved, so my rich readers should contact Phyllis Herendeen at the
Unique Boutique in Albion, or by e-mail at pjhere@ligtel.com.

What do you
mean, I don’t have any rich readers?

I know what
you’re thinking: “But Mark, you hate opera.”

True. But I
like orchestras, which performed there, and I love movies, which were screened
there. Other people like sports: Basketball games were once played in the Opera
House. Suppers, musicals, dances … it was an armory during World War 2, and for
a short time in the 1880’s it housed the Noble County Government. Maybe they
even had operas there. Just ask Linda Shultz, who wrote a book about Albion’s
history long before I did. (What, you thought I was original?)

But the
reason I want to see the building saved dates not back to its construction
before the 1880’s, but for something that happened to it in 1931 – something
that should have ensured its destruction.

Considering
the story I started with, I suppose no one is in suspense.

Consider
not only the fire, but the times: It was January 16, 1931, when someone noticed
the flames at about 11 p.m.

Only a year
earlier the Albion Fire Department got their first motorized fire truck, a 1929
engine. When fire broke out in the large two story brick Opera House, and
threatened to spread to other nearby structures, that was the first apparatus
out of the firehouse two blocks away.

Second came
a Ford pickup truck, on which had been mounted the chemical engine that was
originally horse-drawn. The Ford also towed a 1910 era two wheeled cart, which
had mounted on it 350 feet of hose. A second, rarely used reserve hose cart
held 200 feet of hose, and was probably hauled to the scene by hand at this
moment of crisis.

That was
it.

Soon the
chemical engine ran out of chemicals to pressurize water. Chief John F.
Gatwood, his two Assistant Chiefs and eighteen volunteers were left with one fire
engine, which could in a best case scenario supply two fire hoses. Did they
call for help from other towns? Sure. But how long did it take other volunteers
to go ten or more miles on 1931 roads, at nighttime in the middle of January?

In case you
haven’t read Smoky Days and Sleepless
Nights, I’m not going to spoil you on whether they managed to save the
Albion Opera House. But I do think that the building is worth saving today.

Well,
shoot.

Okay, forget the spoiler thing. The
Noble County Democrat newspaper
office on the first floor was saved, and by the first week of February
contractors named Moore and Thomas started work on remodeling. Twenty-seven
local businessmen each donated $100 to rebuild the second floor, putting in a
brand new arched roof and a bigger stage. The place was open for business in
two months.

So yeah, I
think it’s worth saving: not only for the historical aspect, but because we
already saved the thing once, doggone it. And while it’s going to take more
than a hundred bucks apiece, I can’t help thinking an effort by local citizens
to restore the place would be worth it.

Personally,
I’d like to own the building myself. It would be cool to have a big open air
apartment upstairs and maybe downstairs a little museum in front and my writing
office in back. But I also think it would be cool to keep the bills I already
have paid, so we’ll have to go to Plan B.